No, no, no...
You don't get it. If you put parenthesis it doesn't work. And you read his problem wrong too... he put NINE after SIX.
See the Wikipedia Entry [wikipedia.org] for an explanation on how/why the program works.

but its a kind of joke typical for america... no knowledge of other world parts and mixing different cultures! go back in time to archimedes and tell him (who was a slave under romans for some time) that you think he writes in latin

OK genius, let's hear your super-enlightened, non-american rendition of the joke. Latin is generally the only ancient language well known enough that one can appropriate a couple word endings, apply them to modern language, and still get the point across. Yes, it would have been more accurate if he'd had Archimedes writing ancient greek, you pedantic troll, but due to lack of greek characters on our keyboards, and the fact that almost nobody would be able to read it, it would no longer be an effective joke because no one would get it.

Dear diary...I am SOOOOOOO embarrassed!!!!! OMG!!! I was like bathing today and like came up with this bitchin' idea about buoyancy and TOTALLY forgot I was like in the public bath, you know? And so I jumped up with my dork all hanging out and ran down the streets yelling like a total moron. OMG, diary O - M - F - G!!!!!!

Yes, similar techniques to the X-Ray fluorescence are being used on a wide range of archaeological finds, from illegible scrolls found in Italy to manuscripts found in various rubbish tips from the dark ages and before.

Actually, the idea seems to have started about 15-20 years ago, of using various attributes to read xsuch documents. A technique was developed in the UK - I believe it was called ESDA - which used magnetic fields and extremely fine iron dust to detect indentations left in paper when layers further up had been written on.

The technique hit the news during the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad fiasco, when it was demonstrated, by use of this technique, that "confessions" had been altered after they had been signed by the supposed confessee. It led to a lot of cases being thrown out on appeal, and a subsequent inquiry as to what had happened.

Other popular techniques include the use of various frequencies of light and/or UV, to reveal marks that wouldn't otherwise be visible, which is how some of the more "legible" parts of the palimpset of Archimedes were photographed prior to this.

Chemical techniques exist, but archaeologists are wary of anything that can damage an ancient find, unless it is so far beyond salvage that preservation of the original would be impossible anyway. Even then, they don't like it and try to avoid it.

The funny thing is, I use a synchrotron regularly to study protein crystals, and we're always freaked out about radiation damage to our proteins. All of our crystals are frozen in liquid nitrogen, and kept cool in a cryojet while collecting data. (At room temperature, crystals fry extremely fast.) I'm curious how they protected the document while doing this study. It wouldn't be hard to burn it, unless they're using extremely short exposure times or a very diffuse beam.

I suppose they use other wavelengths, longer ones (they're not trying to tell the position of each atom in their artefact, just the density variations -- I suppose). Longer wavelengths -- lower frequencies -- lower energy of the photons -- less damage.

I'm not a protein crystallographer, but I do work at a synchrotron and do lots of x-ray absorption and diffraction experiments. I've never had a problem with x-ray damage to my samples (mostly inorganic solids).
Susceptibility to radiation damage varies from material to material. From my understanding, protein crystals are particularly bad, presumably because they not respond well (in a chemical sense) to the large numbers of electrons generated after an x-ray absorption event. This basically causes impurities in the crystal (local changes in the structure factor) that degrade the diffraction measurement. Also, in your typical protein diffraction experiment, you irradiate a particular spot on the crystal for a very long time.
I would guess that this is not so much an issue in this case, because (1) no one is really interested in the chemical structure of the parchment itself, and (2) a particular spot on the sample is exposed only for a very short time.
Incidentally, there's a better write-up of this at Stanford:
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/may25/a rchimedes-052505.html [stanford.edu]

as Archimedes Plutonium [wikipedia.org]. According to the aforelinked repository of unblemished truth that is Wikipedia, Archimedes has since discovered

1. Plutonium Atom Totality theory. According to this theory, there was no Big Bang, but rather growth from a "Hydrogen Atom Totality" into the present "Plutonium Atom Totality", in which "the galaxies are dots of the electron dot cloud".

2. Fusion Barrier Principle. Quoting Plutonium, "Fission energy is the highest form of energy that is able to be controlled and surpass breakeven".

3. Unification of the Forces of Physics as a Coulomb Unification.

4. Stonethrowing theory. This theory states that the difference between apes and humans resulted some 8 to 10 million years ago from a solo quadruped ape that "started throwing rocks overarm and overhead". This activity gave the ape advantages in getting food and more females for mating purposes "by killing other rivals using throwing".

5. Possibility of global warming reversal. According to Plutonium's theory, there exists a CFC variant or methyl molecule that when produced and released will act as an "upper atmosphere earth air conditioner and reverse global warming".""

Despite that the brilliance of his ideas so obviously extended the work of Archimedes the Greek, it took the reincarnated Archimedes 44 years to realize that he was in fact Archimedes:

In autumn of 1994 he claims to have realized that he was the reincarnation of the great early Greek scientist Archimedes, and so once again changed his name to Archimedes Plutonium.

What I want to know is why we continue to dwell so much on Archimedes' old work when he has been producing so much insight as of late and it has yet to be properly appreciated.

"There is no better example of how theft dims the magic of history for everyone than this report today regarding SLAC providing users with illegal copies of Archimedes' ancient work. The unfortunate fact is this type of theft happens on a regular basis using particle accelerators all over the world."

Perhaps not, but there's an excellent chance it will reveal more of what little we now know of his anticipation of Integral Calculus by 1,000 years. For the Physics and Mathematics communities, this is *huge*.

Dude, wouldn't be crazy if like... Archimedes was stuck in a time loop, and he's all not really alive and shit? You know, like... What if we invent a time machine and bring Archimedes back, and he's all like "what the fuck? You idiots this time machine is the shit that resets everything!" and then the scientists all bust out laughing and shit, but then when they try to send him back in time the time machine all starts smoking and shit, really crazy you know, and civilisation gets set back to the time where Archimedes wrote that crazy ass formula down! Then he's all like, shaking his head, because he knows it will happen again in a few thousand years.

In times of Columbus, those crazy Europeans already knew the Earth was not flat (at least the guys at the University of Salamanca knew that when they dumped Columbus' proposal to sail West to reach Indies).

The actual technique used is quite ingenious, but has been around for a while. If you blast the nucleus of an atom with X-Rays of a frequency specific to that type of atom, it will radiate electrons. No other atom will do so, so you can get an exact picture of what is there.

(Actually, the reverse is also true. If you bombard atoms with electrons of the right energy, the atoms will radiate X-Rays.)

The very brief article submitted by the poster does not do this subject justice, as this is a highly sophisticated story involving the specific nature of ancient inks, the problems of 12th century economics which reduced many cultures to reprocessing books (the results of which are called palimpsets), the fact that these texts are direct transcripts of the original scrolls written by Archimedes, in their original format, the fact that the book was stored in a city that was virtually razed to the ground during the 4th Crusade, the fact that the book went missing during the early part of the 20th century, etc.

It also doesn't cover the fact that the pages are badly damaged by fungi, age, fire, vandalism, the whole palimpset process, poor storage, etc.

This is a truly amazing story, that covers both some of the most ancient and most modern of sciences, involving wars, religion, several renesance periods without which the text would have been lost forever, and numerous other adventures that would put the entire Indiana Jones series to shame.

This story deserves telling in the full, especially on a site like Slashdot where people have the background to appreciate the nuances involved.

... this is a highly sophisticated story involving the specific nature of ancient inks, the problems of 12th century economics which reduced many cultures to reprocessing books (the results of which are called palimpsets)

I'll probably get modded down for this spelling nitpick, but I think you mean "palimpsests". I misspelled that word before a national audience in 1992, don't want you to make the same mistake in this international forum.;)

If you blast the nucleus of an atom with X-Rays of a frequency specific to that type of atom, it will radiate electrons. No other atom will do so, so you can get an exact picture of what is there.

I thought this was particularly cool because it's the exact technique used to determine the majority of new protein structures. I would not have predicted that it would be equally well suited towards a completely different type of imaging, particularly for something so esoteric as ancient manuscripts. (On a sid

I watched a program about the amazing discoveries uncovered through the painstaking analysis of this parchment.

One of the most stunning discoveries was the description by Archimedes of his method for finding the area under a curve though a rudimentary form of integral calculus, 2000 years before Newton or Leibniz!

He established the law of levers, found the relationship of the area of a cylinder to a sphere (which he believed to be his greatest discovery and he directed a model of which to be inscribed on his tomb), described the relationship of volume and buoyancy in water (his eureka! moment), among many other mathematical and mechanical discoveries.

I like blaming religion for stuff too, but in this case, you can't really pin it on them.

A lot of monks basically spent their lives copying and recopying texts. There wasn't anything else to do with them, really. Without them, a lot more information would have been lost. ALL of Archimedes works would probably be gone. With them would likely go Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Homer, etc. etc. Only the rich Arab kingdoms preserved more knowledge through the Middle Ages than Christian Monks, and even there, it was religion at work, not society in general.

A lot was lost in that time. Libraries and monastaries burned down, taking God knows how much knowledge with them. Some books were lost, damaged by accident, and some were even destroyed intentionally, but imagine how much survived, and remember that it would all have been gone without the Christian and Muslim clergy that preserved them. The Rennaisance would have been a blank slate without them. We'd be lucky to have rediscovered all of it by now. Heck, we probably wouldn't even have realized it was lost yet.

I think this situation comes down to pure carelessness. A monk needed parchment, and the only way to get it was to erase something. Because they spend their lives copying text, many monasteries would have multiple copies of any given text on hand. I think it most likely that the monk assumed another copy existed, and that one could be sacrificed for the need at hand, and be replaced later when paper was available.

Think of it sort of like back in the old days when floppy disks served most people's removable storage needs, and there never seemed to be enough of them around. You needed an extra 250 kb on your hard drive (back when that was a lot of space), and you noticed an old document you hadn't touched in months. "Oh, yeah, I've got that backed up on a floppy disk, I can delete that." So you do. What happens later when you realize that you didn't have it backed up, but that you'd erased the disk you'd stored it on in order to back up some other file? You've just lost that file.

Not only was a lot of the knowledge preserved, much of what was lost was destroyed by secular forces. Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier who grew impatient when the inventor didn't come quickly enough. The Library of Alexandria was burned down by the Romans.

I must say, if the Church ever did anything right, it was preserving the works of the great masters. Sure, they may not have been complete, and they may have destroyed some other works that they disagreed with, but all in all, it was the Church th

Thank you for spelling this one out. I agree, most of the losses of classical works were not due to a crusading fundamentalist attitude. Rather, it was a simple matter of recycling the materials which were of little or no interest to anyone. We can blame the organized religion for taking us into a cultural recession of the middle ages (in which the classical works became irrelevant), but that's a whole different matter. I'd say, what the monk did was actually prudent for what had known.

Much of what was lost was lost before the Middle Ages. Most of the ancient contributions to science and mathematics happened before the first century BC. As Roman rule spread to encompass much of the Hellenistic world, interest in these subjects waned. There was a brief resurgence in interest for about a generation in the 2nd century AD (Galen, Ptolemy, and Heron all hail from this period), but other than that, ancient science was moribund by imperial times.

I like blaming religion for stuff too, but in this case, you can't really pin it on them.

Classical Greek thought was rooted in deductions based on first principles. Think of the elegant abstractions of Euclidean geometry. Archimedes was very much the outsider in his taste for experiment and in learning from the imperfections of the real world.

That makes it all the more striking that Archimedes was known and read in Christian Byzantium for 900 years, 300-1200 AD, and influced the design the great 6th C.

Comes to 7 weeks, 4-5 of which (3 outside of winter) are occupied of moving them with a pole in a bath 2-3 times a day, another week is letting them dry, another week is putting them in baths or scraping or hanging. Compared to transcribing 174 pages of Archimedes, and scraping those pages clean.

Thanks for the details - that definitely would be a lot less work for a 12C monk than the destroyed transcription work plus the scraping.

While you are at it blame the romans too. They burned down the library of alexandria which at the time contained pretty much every important document the greeks made plus quite a few arabic and other cultures too.

I was once reading an article by Phillip K Dick. In it he said that one day his doorbell rang and there was a young lady who had a christian fish symbol on her necklace. When he looked at it he said he got momentarily a vision of life as it was 2000 years ago. He said that he thinks all time periods exits simultaniously and it's just that we can't percieve all of them.

Anyway I bring this up because it seems to me that nothing has changed in the last 5000 years of human history. The more that things change

I guess you didn't read the part where the book in question was copied by a scribe (most likely a monk) in the 10th century from the original Greek scrolls. But that would be a case of religious people making sure that the knowledge would be kept alive and that just doesn't fit with your bias, now does it?

And claiming "well, we don't know that it wouldn't have been destroyed by someone else in some other way anyway" is hardly adequate justification.

Well, it is, sort of. Recall that Archimedes was casually killed by a Roman solider without very good cause. It's arguable that Western civilization needed to progress to the point where it's scientists and scholars could get on with the job of discovery in relative peace and quiet, else it would quickly destroy itself with the new weapons that inevitably res

The program appeared on PBS as a Nova special and it was clear that scholars were stunned to find that Archimedes devised a simple form of integral calculus in an attempt to find the area under a curve, something that was unknown prior to the investigation of the parchment.

Archimedes treatises on levers, the value of PI, and his other mathematical discoveries have been known to us for centuries and I was simply listing off his notable achievements.

Archimedes claimed: "Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world."

He developed the claim into The Claw [drexel.edu], which must have been a wonder to see in action. I've never been able to find out if the Roman soldier who killed him was punished or had anything to say. Archimedes was an engineer who applied the principles of Euclidean geometry.

Give me but one firm spot on which to stand, and I will move the earth.

That got translated from the original Attic Greek into common Greek, then into High Latin, then Vulgar Latin, and then into Old French, then soon after that into Old English. When William the Conqueror took over England in 1066, the new language that got created got it a little mixed up at first:

Give me but one firm spot on which to sit, and I will move my bowels.

Somehow it doesn't seem to mean quite the same thing, but I can't quite figure out where the difference is.

Much as I'd love to make one of the jokes forming up in my mind, I have to say this may have been something less than intentionally stifling percieved heresy. The paper was erased and reused to make a prayer book. The usual way of treating heresy was to burn it. The fact that it was erased and reused suggests it wasn't considered heresy, which in turn suggests to me one of a few likely scenarios:

A. The monk who erased it didn't know there was any significance in the paper to make it worth preservation.B. The monk thought there were other copies in existence (and there well could have been at the time, only to be lost later), and thus the one he had was expendableC. The monk just wasn't that bright.

There's just a little more to the story than that. It was considered a virtuous act to cover over 'heathen' writings with Christian writings. More cynical/. readers will probably say that this is a nice way of justifying what the parent poster said.

One of the major problems with the whole palimpsest system of, er, 'recycling' is the difference in binding. Most Classical-era works were in scroll form, and by the time the monks started copying over them, the book was the dominant form of binding. This meant

There are plenty of twelfth-century scholars in the West and in the Greek East who read and appreciated ancient Greek and Latin texts; and the vast majority of these were churchmen. Their reaction to a 12th-century monk scraping off Archimedes and copying down a prayer-book would be much like ours, as in "Hey Rube, WTF are you doing?" But well, not everybody is educated to the same degree, and a poor monastery may indeed find the parchment more valuable than the indeciphrable gibberish written on it.

For those of you who can't grasp the concept, it's like when ma threw out all the old baseball cards; you fought it at the time, and twenty years later you know the retail value of what you lost. Ignorance spans all periods; but in spite of what crap 19th-century progressivism may make you think about the middle ages, medieval people didn't hate and seek to destroy antique texts; quite the contrary, they liked them, and they found ancient science very useful. Remember this text was copied in the 10th century by a monk as well.

First, the concept of monastic "order" really begins in the beginning of the twelfth century with the military orders, the cistercians, and the premonstratensian canons.

Second, you're assuming this is a western manuscript, when some of the other contextual marks suggest that in fact it was produced in Constantinople. Basilean monks did know Greek. And in the west, it depends on where you're talking about. Spain was an active center for Greek/Arabic/Hebrew -> Latin translation of texts, especially scientific ones. Southern Italy had large communities of Greek speaking peoples. Hell, even the bishop of Lincoln and not a bad scientist in his own right, Robert Grosseteste, knew and translated ancient Greek.

Something abstract such as "The Church" is not an historical agent; individual churchmen can be.

As I posted above (and got modded flamebait somehow), there's quite a few explanations for this.

A. The monk may not have realized it was something special at all. If you don't understand the material at hand, two papers on the same subject tend to look an awful lot alike.B. He may have assumed more than one copy existed, and for that matter he may have been right at the time, and only afterwards were the other copies lost. It's really not an unreasonable assumtion to make - most of the monks in medieval Europe spent their whole lives copying and recopying various texts. You'd expect any book to find its way into a monastery would end up being duplicated many times over, and sent to other monasteries where it would be duplicated furthur. This didn't always happen, of course, and I personally suspect that simple carelessness like this is responsible for a great deal of lost writings, and not mindless book burning and censorship that gets blamed so often.

To add irony to the story, it was covered by a simple prayerbook. The discoverer was only able to make a tantalizing transcription of some of the text before it was lost. Before it was recovered some con-artist had painted fake devotional paintings over some of the pages in order to increase the value. Then I believe it was bought by a collector who did not understand what it was and taken to France, where his heirs made the re-discovery.

To put this in perspective, traditonal goatskin parchment currently sells for about $17 USD a square foot. Pergamena [pergamena.net]

Take goatskins ( 1 ) and stand them in water for a day and a night. Take them and wash them till the water runs clear ( 2 ). Take an entirely new bath and place therein old lime (calcem non recentem) and water mixing well together to for a thick cloudy liquor. Place the skins into this, folding them on the flesh side. Move them with a pole two or three times each day, leaving them for eight days (and twice as long in winter) ( 3 ).
Next you must withdraw the skins and unhair them ( 4 ). Pour off the contents of the bath and repeat the process using the same quantities, placing the skins in the lime liquor, and moving them once each day over eight days as before ( 5 ).
Then take them out and wash them well until the water runs quite clean ( 6 ). Place them in another bath with clean water and leave them for two days ( 7 ).
Then take them out, attach the cords and tie them to the circular frame ( 8 ). Dry, then shave them with a sharp knife, after which, leave for two days out of the sun...( 9 ) moisten with water and rub the flesh side with powdered pumice ( 10 ). After two days wet it again by sprinkling with a little water and fully clean the flesh side with pumice so as to make it quite wet again ( 11 ). Then tighten up the cords, equalise the tension so that the sheet will become permanent. Once the sheets are dry, nothing further remains to be done ( 12 ). Parchment, the recipe [dedas.com]

Why would scraped and dried animal skins be rare and costly in the 12th Century farming economy where these monks lived?

Because it took a lot a scraping, tanning treatments and required specific animals (freshly born lambs for vellum). Anything less would be of the quality of something written on the inside of an ug boot.

Looking at today's antiscience crusade by religious powermongers

Once again it's really just politics - the medieval church was not under the delusion that Aristotle was a Christian, but directly challenging what church officials taught, no matter what it was, was undermining their authority so was punished. The roman church was the only major force for higher education in europe for a long time.

After 600 years in the hands of the Catholic Church, European civilization had lost most of its heritage of learning and rationality it inherited from the Grecoromans who produced it.

So what do you call all the Platonists and Aristotelian Catholic philosophers? St. Augustine was a definite Platonist, using it to explain Christian ideology in a manner that (attempted to be) rational. Same with St. Aquinas, who was an Aristotelian and hailed as the greatest philosopher of the Catholic Church. Whatever you might think of their Scholasticism, they were trying to be as hyper-rational and logical as one could imagine. Yes, they had definite agendas in mind (i.e. justifying Christianity), but you can't just dismiss them and say that Grecoroman learning and rationality "disappeared."

If you know any of your art history, Grecoroman culture was also preserved to a certain extent (hence, Romanesque art), but it was later pushed aside by more German and French styles (Gothic), which were in vogue because people liked windows (which Romanesque styles didn't really support) in their Cathedrals.

Whoever rated this post as insightful? It's just ignorant. Vellum was a highly costly resource in medieval society because it's obtain from the skin of a young, animal - usually a calf. As generally speaking a cow would only produce one calf per year the cost of producing a calf's worth of vellum is the cost of keeping a cow alive over the winter needed to produce the calf - which was more difficult at the time because in the abscence of root feeds most cattle were slaughtered and salted in the autumn, plus the loss of revenue from allowing the calf to grow.

Although it's true that there does appear to have been periods when medieval society was relatively affluent - the 12th Century in particular - famine was never far away and the grinding poverty should not be underestimated. There are even accounts of periods where it is remarked by chroniclers that it was not uncommon for peasants to own just a single garment or even none at all. This cannot have been the norm as otherwise the chroniclers would not have remarked upon it, but nevertheless, in a society which is living as close to the edge as medieval europe managed to do it is not suprising that vellum for books was a costly and rare resource

Why would scraped and dried animal skins be rare and costly in the 12th Century farming economy where these monks lived?

You start your post off by showing that your just making stuff up, this is good because it lets any reader who knows anything about 12th century Europe, and especialy anyone with a college degree (I'm pretty sure most schools require Medieval Lit as a GE requirement), know that you dont have a clue. Unfortunately some mod seems to have fallen into the "with out clue" category. You see parchment was incredibly expencive in the Middle Ages. To put it into perspective, it took around 200 sheep to make 1 bible. And while your right that it was a farming economy, the nobles owned all the land, and all of the cattle on the land. Only the wealthy could afford even a single book. Even into the 13th and 14th centuries the largest libraries had at most 1000 books.

I don't buy the "necessity" of erasing Archimedes' works, no matter how often they repeat that story to elementary schoolers learning the definition of "palimpset", or how many of us grow up to write stories for newspapers repeating it.

Sure it wasn't "necessary" to erase Archimedes work, but it was definately much cheeper. Imaginge a new notebook cost somewhere in the area of $5k, and you had to write a book, would you a) Buy a new notebook or b) Erase some less important writings. Of course you go on to suggest that the christian monk erased it because it was evil science. But considering every single work of writing that we have that originated durring or before the dark ages was writen by someone who had church sanctioned training? In fact, beyond that, just about everything from the Roman era and earlier can be attibuted to Irish monks who were very much religious. And then there is the the book in question that had Archimedes on it, and oh yeah, it was a monk who wrote that as well. Are you starting to see how your argument doesn't make much sense? The reality of the matter is, some monastery felt a prayer book was a more important use of the parchment than the writings or Archimedes, writings that no doubt existed in other places at the time. Writings that were probably all destroyed by fires and other natural causes.

If you're so concerned about money being spent on anything besides cancer research, the why are you here? Surely it would be better if you spent the money you spend to go online on cancer research instead, and donated your computer to charity, and spent the time you'd otherwise spend on writing comments here working for a cancer charity?

Now, if you want to donate your time and money to cancer research, great. But don't whine because others care about other causes.